APM vs NPM

overview

APM: Short for Application Performance Monitoring, that is, Application Performance Monitoring.
NPM: Short for Network Performance Monitoring, that is, Network Performance Monitoring.

Technical implementation

• APM: Install the agent on the application server
• NPM: Switch network traffic mirroring

deploy

• APM: Each application server requires an agent to be installed
• NPM: The application of interest, i.e. IP plus port, must all mirror the switch traffic through which it passes

Supported technologies

• APM: All apply Java .NET PHP nodejs frameworks
• NPM: http, TCP and other network protocols

Monitor the magnitude

• APM: All internal application call procedures, memory objects and threads are resolved on the application server.
• NPM: Only involves the request of the protocol, such as the URL, and cannot be called in depth. It is also impossible to automate full tandem tracking of transactions; But there will be network performance of network devices.

shortcoming

NPM

• Traffic that does not go through the switch, such as virtual machines on the same host, cannot be monitored
• Monitoring is limited to the network level and does not provide insight into applications and code
• If the network protocol is encrypted, the private key may be required for decryption, or it cannot be decrypted, or the decryption process performance consumption is large.
• Data outside the data center cannot be monitored

APM

• It mainly supports monitoring of JAVA/.Net and other languages, and cannot be monitored by specific languages (such as C) and specific application servers (such as Tuxedo).
• Commercial APM is billed per node, which is difficult to achieve full coverage
• Data center, if the technology stack does not support it, it cannot be fully monitored
• Intrusive deployment

merit

NPM

• Full data center coverage (of course, it is also conditional, but it is easier to achieve than APM)
• Through the monitoring of relevant network protocols, the effect of customer attention can be achieved more widely
• Complete and proven solutions for banking transactions (e.g. Tiandan BPC)
• Deploy non-intrusive

APM

• Can monitor data outside the data center (in fact, RUM is required for Real User Monitoring)
• In-depth tracing of application performance issues (specific to methods/thread snapshots/memory snapshots/exceptions/logs/synchronous asynchronous calls, etc.)
• User experience management (user operation/mobile app/browser) (also via RUM)

Applicable scenarios

APM

• Focus more on application performance
• Development/middleware O&M
• Key application/middleware metrics need to be monitored and alerted
• The system architecture is JAVA/.NET/php/node.js… (No C without tuxedo), automatic transaction correlation can be carried out, and the monitoring granularity will be very fine.
• It is necessary to monitor the user experience outside the data center (such as user click operation data/mobile APP/browser-side data).

NPM

• Business monitoring (typically e.g. number of bank transactions)
• Pay more attention to network performance issues
• The system architecture contains non-.NET/JAVA systems, such as Tuxedo
• Intrusive deployments are not acceptable
• Banks (with complete solutions, such as Tiandan BPC)